🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017 23:29:28 -0700, "rms"
<rsqui...@MOOyossmanMOO.net> wrote:

>> I use the
>>built-in Windows recovery media system for that (burning the recovery
>>media for each system to its own thumb drive).  I've never actually
>>needed to do a restore using the Windows method, knock on wood.
>
>    I did try to restore using the built-in backup/restore utility, and it 
>failed, due to some obscure drive letter difference.  Having a usb drive 
>installed can foul it up, and I never did figure out exactly what the issue 
>was.  Most 3rd party utilities are much smarter, with no such silly 
>rigidity.  The official release of Win10 is very stable for me now, but I 
>was on the 'Fast ring' of builds for a while, which had serious bugs and 
>often failed to rollback properly, and a simple reliable full partition 
>recovery option was a godsend.

I would consider installing beta OS builds on anything other than a VM
or a test machine as living on the edge :)... but yeah it's smart to
have a very good backup plan if you do that.

I've never actually done a restore from Windows recovery media, so I'm
not sure how that would go, although I definately have USB drives
installed when I do it, since that's what the recovery media is (one
cheap thumb drive for each PC).

But, I don't depend on that to save my ass in a critical situation.
Most of my truly important stuff can be categorized as:

- Data (docs, photos, spreadsheets etc, some going back 30 years or
so!).  Everything is organized under one folder, been like that since
my early PC days.  I don't use the standard windows folders like
documents, pictures and such, because my backup strategy started long
before MS even came up with this folder structure, and I don't want to
change my organization of things every time someone else changes their
mind.  Plus I like having a consistent file organization that is
independent of Win, Mac, Linux etc, especially since I do have a lot
of Mac stuff as well.  

- Source code (work related and experimental projects, but these are
also backed up somewhere in a code repo)

- Emails (also going back decades, but due to criticality I treat them
differently than my data folder).  

- Music (listening).  This is just a massive collection of DRM-less
MP3 files that's taken a long time to acquire and thus I'd prefer not
to lose.  Gets backed up locally and to the cloud.

-Music (creation).  Tracks I've written, sound patches and audio
samples that either I created/bought/ otherwise acquired over the
years (i.e. large media files)

-Videos (mostly captured from elsewhere using Bandicam or some other
screen cap mechanism).  This is mostly technical videos, training
vids, how-to, etc.  In the old days when we read a book that we would
want to refer back to later, we simply kept the book.  However, these
days, a lot of people are too damn lazy to write a book with their
ideas, they just make a video and put it online somewhere.  It's a
difficult-to-search-or-index format, which makes information retrieval
difficult.  One thing I've learned, however, is that you cannot be
sure that a streaming video that's accessible today will be accessible
tomorrow, so if you see something you like snag it and keep your own
copy.  
These of course consume massive amounts of space.

-Virtual Machines.  Various VM configurations that I keep because I
wouldn't want to have to build them from scratch.


So, all told it's quite a bit of stuff.  In terms of gaming backups I
rarely bother.  Occasionally I have backed up some old single player
saves, but I find I rarely have time to go back to them.  The games I
most care about keeping my progress in are multiplayer games where
everything is stored in the cloud anyway, or in some cases Steam takes
care of cloud storage for game progress.